


Trinity

by IoanNemos



Category: The Physician (2013)
Genre: Barely Averted Execution, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Religious Conflict, Religious Content, Sickfic, Suicide, Surgery, oh lord these tags... this is mostly soft and sweet i PROMISE...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22829434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IoanNemos/pseuds/IoanNemos
Summary: Some students at his school have, to one degree or another, become surrogate sons. But there is something about Jesse ben Benjamin that takes him from a different angle.
Relationships: Ibn Sina & Rob Cole
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. Father

**Author's Note:**

> As a Christian myself, I can't honestly say I 100% agree with anyone's religious views in this story (this was the time of indulgences and the Crusades, after all), but I hope I did them all justice.

Ibn Sina has never had children.

In his life, he has taken few lovers; he gives his work and students so much of his time that there is little enough left to eat properly or sleep well, let alone give a woman the attention she deserves. His work is jealous, and few will tolerate her iron grip. This is something he is well aware of, and while at times his heart does pang for a familiar voice, he has become content with his choices. The hospital and the school are his life, his work, and his legacy in one: he tends them, fills them with knowledge and learning and healing, knows every corner, every gardener and sweeper and laundry-maid, and he takes satisfaction in that.

Nearly all his students crave his approval, jump to prove their worth, and jostle each other like children for opportunities to show off their knowledge. Some students at his school have, to one degree or another, become surrogate sons. But there is something about Jesse ben Benjamin that takes him from a different angle.

Their first meeting was hardly auspicious: it was early enough that it was as he was coming in to the school that Ibn Sina found the boy sprawled on the paving stones, gaunt and sunburnt, in clothes full of sand and his turban soaking up blood from a head wound. He waited by the boy while the student who had come out to greet him went back inside for another pair of hands and a stretcher.

The boy neither woke nor moved as they took him inside and only moaned softly as they stripped him of his clothes, so much sand shaking out that it crunched underfoot. What a terrible example of humanity he was, then: every curve of rib and hip jutting through, the straight rods of his collarbones stretching his pale skin taut. He was not difficult to manipulate into a clean robe and lay out on a bed, the cut on his forehead still leaking, if sluggishly now, into his tangled curls. Ibn Sina allowed one of his more advanced students to demonstrate his abilities in cleaning, numbing, and suturing, and they moved on.

He wasn’t a notable patient in any sense: they have treated people whose names they never learned and in the scale of the day, he barely rated mention. Yet it was to his bed that Ibn Sina went later, and it was in a mortar nearby that he was mixing the ingredients for a salve when the boy finally stirred. When he warned the boy not to touch the stitches, he did regardless, but with an exploratory curiosity. He asked about his own care, and murmured, “Poppy seed ointment,” as though copying it down in his head.

And then that breathless, guileless voice with the strange accent announced that he had come to be a student of the greatest healer in the world. When the boy thought it might be in reach again he twisted on the bed, implored him for a good word as he struggled to sit up, those wide, pale eyes aching for it like a starving man’s stomach aches for bread.

He could feel the hunger, the tenacity, the _will_ even in that brief moment, even before finding out just how far the boy had already come. He made his decision outside the room, listening for a moment while the hakim urged him to lay back down, to take some water, to sit still while he applied the salve to his inflamed skin. Whatever the boy’s name or circumstances, he would become a student.

Jesse ben Benjamin is neither the smartest nor the cleverest boy he has ever taught. He takes to the routine of things for the most part, though occasionally on some subject or other Ibn Sina will look to see if he has understood and find the boy’s gaze drifting away, his mind exploring its own pasture. He is friendly and earnest, and has compassion beyond bounds, but he is naive, awkward with others, with an inherent gracelessness that bespeaks his backwoods, sometimes backwards upbringing, times when he misses the warning in a word or a glance and stumbles into offense. His response to hostility is telling: from peers, nervous deferral and anxious apology can turn suddenly to clenched fists and an unconscious half-step back into a grounded stance, showing a sharpened readiness to fight, though he never starts one and prefers to avoid blows than trade them. From those in authority, though, he takes criticism hard, with bowed shoulders and lowered eyes and a slavedriver’s pitiless harshness with himself to improve.

But it is his hunger for knowledge that brings out the brilliant spark that lights him from the inside. Sometimes his insatiable curiosity causes sighs and ugly looks from his fellow students when he asks so many questions, one after another, not just wanting to know how a thing works but why this way and not that. At least once a week he keeps a lesson going past its intended hour while Ibn Sina at first answers his questions and then aids the class in discovering the remaining answers. While the other students groan as they stand, sending more expressions of exasperation in his direction, the boy is too busy making notes to notice, pen flying across the paper. If Ibn Sina finds himself staying late at the school, Jesse is the student most likely at hand, usually found comparing texts by oil lamp, hands shaking from exhaustion but eyes alight with learning. More than once he finds the boy asleep near the books (never on, for he respects them too much) and has to wake him and send him home with a guard to be sure he gets there safely.

One day Ibn Sina hears one of his hakims berating a student for impatience, pride, and disrespect, and carefully twitches aside a curtain to see who is receiving such a verbal thrashing. He’s shocked to see it’s Jesse. As he listens, he’s confused by the hakim’s continued anger as Jesse stands for his lashing, trembling, silent, hands limp, worrying his lower lip in his teeth while his pale eyes brim with tears. “Furthermore,” the hakim barks, and Jesse flinches, whimpering so low it’s nearly lost in the background noise.

“Enough,” Ibn Sina says, with more bite in it than he intended. The hakim whirls and, though already flushed, reddens further; Jesse flinches again, sinking his teeth deeper into his lip. “Rashnu, go calm yourself.” The hakim frowns, then bows slightly and after one last glare in the boy’s direction he leaves. Jesse shifts on his feet, as if in preparation for being told to do the same. “Jesse,” he begins, gently, and then pauses in dismay as the boy drops to his knees as he bursts into tears.

“Please don’t send me away, Master,” he pleads through sobs, wringing his hands. “Please, I beg you, I don’t want to leave-”

“Who said anything about leaving?”

“He says I oughtn’t to be here, you don’t have the room or time for stupid people-”

“I haven’t,” he interrupts, and the boy’s tears increase as he moans, spine bending under grief as he misunderstands. “Jesse, calm yourself. I am not sending you away.” The boy finally looks up to meet his gaze, his pale eyes shouting his agonized uncertainty. He looks so young in this moment, less like a hakim in training and more like a child that has just been told a well-deserved beating is postponed, that his next question comes out almost involuntarily. “What is your age, Jesse?”

The boy has to think it through, lips moving in silent tally. “Eighteen years, Master.”

“Merciful God preserve us,” Ibn Sina murmurs, gripping his staff. That means he left his home at sixteen, left everything familiar behind, on a mere hope to be accepted here. He spent his seventeenth year in ships and caravans, trusting in the truthfulness and hospitality of strangers for his safe passage. His God certainly watched over him, that he was neither lost nor misled, came to neither accident nor malicious action. His must be a story of both the will to triumph over and through all and the sweet innocence of childlike faith.

“He does, Master,” Jesse says, voice still shaking, though now he tries to gulp down his sobs and rubs his eyes with the edges of his sleeves. He seems shamed by his tears now, trying desperately to pretend they didn’t happen.

Ibn Sina settles onto an empty bed with a sigh and gestures for Jesse to join him. The boy immediately settles into a more comfortable cross-legged position, looking up with a level of attention that would make a lesser man nervous, throat working as he swallows, trying to press down his emotions so he can absorb whatever teaching he expects to come his way. His pale eyes are red-rimmed and still gleam. “No, up here, boy.” Confused, the boy obeys, climbing to sit on the edge of the bed. Ibn Sina looks him over, from the dark curly hair escaping both his yarmulke and the gathering at the nape of his neck to the wrinkles in the boy’s clothes from his tear-wet hands gripping the fabric tight enough that his knuckles show white. The boy has quick, skillful, beautiful hands, as steady with a scalpel as with a baby born early. A hakim’s hands. “You belong here, Jesse ben Benjamin,” he says solemnly, and wishes the boy didn’t look down at his lap. “Yes, you do, or you wouldn’t still be here. I do not have the time nor the patience for pretty lies, let alone wasting such precious and finite resources on a lost cause. That’s the first thing.”

“Yes, Master,” Jesse whispers, nearly inaudible, fingers bunching and smoothing the fabric at his knees.

“The second thing is that you oughtn’t to be ashamed of your tears. They’re a sign that your emotions are working properly. So long as you are human, sometimes your feelings will be overwhelming, and tears release that strain. Only a fool says a man doesn’t cry.” A few tears slip down the boy’s cheeks. Ibn Sina brushes them away with a thumb, making Jesse jump and look at him in stunned silence. “And the third thing,” Ibn Sina says, not sure what it was his heart was building up to until now as it comes out, the sentiment strong even if his voice is somewhat choked, “is that I am proud of you. Every day you make me proud, with your questions and your tenacity.”

The boy stares, shocked, mouth hanging open. “But,” he stutters, “I ask because- Hakim Rashnu said-”

“Ah,” he interrupts, “he called you impertinent, impatient, and so forth, did he?” A hesitant nod. “He has clearly forgotten a pupil’s duty, then. How can you be expected to learn if you don’t ask?” He places a hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezes gently. He can feel the boy’s pulse under his fingers, beating hard. “That’s what questions are for, Jesse. The man who thinks he knows everything will never learn anything because he will never ask. Even when there is no answer, or no one answer can be agreed upon, the question is still important. You are not easily satisfied with others’ answers, and sometimes not even with their questions. Always you want to learn more, you want to understand better, and that is the best kind of student to have. Oh, Jesse, how could I ever send you away? I wish I had more like you.”

Jesse swallows. More tears slip down his face. “Thank you, Master,” he whispers, trying to smile. It crumbles quickly, like rotten plaster, and he hides his face in his hands, shoulders turning inward as he begins crying in earnest again. Ibn Sina remains where he is, with his hand still on the boy’s shoulder, until the calm comes after the storm.


	2. Son

Ibn Sina has never had children.

Between the rare birth brought to them by a frightened midwife, hosts of childhood ailments, and injuries that can happen at any age, he has had everything to do with children. For every parent who comes in weeping and leaves rejoicing, he claims a small part, perhaps half a thimble’s worth of credit. Their children’s bodies are remarkable, complicated things that they must nevertheless strive to understand and help heal. There are many children running around Isfahan thanks to his work, and in his selfish, yearning heart, he calls them his own.

There are some hakim who work out of love for their fellow man. There are some who do it for money or prestige. Ibn Sina is a hakim out of love, but not just for his fellow man: he does it for love of knowledge, love of learning, love of teaching. He tries to impress upon his students the love for the whole; not just the whole man, soul and all, but the whole universe. His knowledge circles him like moons, sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, but always shining in the dark.

Jesse ben Benjamin wants to understand the whole universe. He chases knowledge with joyful abandon, listens to anyone willing to teach. At first this worried Ibn Sina: with such an open approach, surely he would fill himself with chaff and choke on it. This is where Jesse’s sensitivity becomes a tuning fork, a sieve, a sword capable of fitting between the smallest gaps in an argument’s armor. He may want this idea or that idea to be true, but he cannot ignore its flaws. Some mornings Mirdin comes in pulling a stumbling Jesse behind him, and the explanation is not drink or women but _thinking_ : he was up all night at it, tossing and turning and finally moving to the roof, where the movement of the stars captivated him for hours. Jesse, too, listens for the music of the spheres.

Most of his students engage in the sort of useless pissing contests he detests, of who is related to more imams, whose father is richest, who has been to the palace most often. Jesse participates sometimes, of course- he’s young and wants to be accepted by his peers. But he wants to know things like who has read the most books, who knows the most riddles, who has solved the most obscure medical puzzle. Part of this is of course from his interest in his studies, but it soon becomes obvious that another part is that while other students can rely on a wealthy father or community connections to win them friends, this is not an option for him.

It is not, Ibn Sina learns, merely because of poverty, though this is a factor. It is also because the boy grew up in a sort of traveling isolation, his only companions a barber and a horse. He lost his mother early and never knew his father, has not a single memory of him. His parents were married, of that he is convinced, their union producing himself and two younger siblings, and then the man vanishes like smoke. Ibn Sina nearly strikes Karim when he wonders aloud how he knows his parents were married, then, but Karim silences himself when Jesse draws back with a pained noise. The subject never resurfaces.

Ibn Sina hears more of Jesse’s story during three days that the boy is sick with a fever. He discovers the boy’s sickness when he catches him descending a staircase with an excess of caution. He explains it as a temporary dizziness, then admits he woke up feeling poorly when the back of a hand pressed to his forehead is snatched away as if from an oven. Ibn Sina orders him to a cool bath and calls for Mirdin, who seems startled to hear that Jesse is ill and claims ignorance. Jesse protests the other student’s innocence with tears, and Ibn Sina drops the topic after sharing a meaningful look with Mirdin, who appears suitably chastised for not noticing anything amiss.

The first night Ibn Sina comes to check on the boy after doing the last evening round of the hospital. He finds him underneath the bed, pressing his face against the cool floor, reciting what might be a prayer but not in a language he thought the boy knew. “Is that Latin?”

The boy startles so violently he hits his head and shoulders on the bedframe. “Ah! I-” He’s still for a moment, then says hesitantly, “Yes, Master. I- A prayer the barber taught me. He was a Christian. He would pray it over me when I was ill. I find it soothing.”

Ibn Sina settles into the chair next to the bed. “How did you come to apprentice to him?”

Jesse hums, amused. “Persistence, mostly: I followed him until he took me on. I had nothing else, nowhere else to go. He called me Rat, a nuisance too small to catch that got into his larder and gave nothing back. I asked too many questions and got underfoot, and he threatened more than once to drown me in the next river.” There is a rich fondness in his tone. “I know now there were nights he went without so that I could eat, claiming a rotten stomach when what he had was an empty one. He sold animal tongues and horse piss as cure-alls and tonics, he spent too much money on drink…” The boy’s voice wavers. “I pray every night God keeps him well. If it weren’t for him I would have starved.”

Ibn Sina resolves to pray the same, for the boy’s sake. Superstition is one of the most common roadblocks to scientific progress, and he usually regards such charlatans as the boy describes as little more than cockroaches. At this moment, he would shake the man’s hand, provided he washed it first. “And now you are here.”

The boy nods, turning towards his new master, though his eyes are closed. “He went blind. Cataracts. He had taught me all he knew, but he knew nothing of curing blindness. I heard of a Jew who could do it and sought him out. He told me about you. About your school. After he cured my master’s cataracts, I had to come and learn from you myself.”

“Of the things the barber taught you, which have been the most relevant?”

The boy smiles. “How to avoid being hit in a fight. Distracting a patient before causing them pain.” The smile slips, a line appearing between his eyes. “A potent burn salve.”

“Who was burnt?”

The boy shifts, searching for a cooler place. “My master. A man died. The barber pulled his tooth at noon and he was dead by evening.” He swallows, hides his face under his arm. “They accused us of witchcraft, beat us, and set the cart on fire with my master inside.”

He imagines the scene and can only picture the boy as when he arrived: filthy, skin and bones, pleading for mercy as men devoid of it strike him until he bleeds, until bruises blossom under his skin, until his mind rejects the pain and puts him to sleep for a while. He feels a lurch in his guts, an echo of worry combined with a gratefulness to the boy’s God who got him here in one piece.

The fever rises and falls, rises and falls. It is little more than a fever: a lack of appetite, headache, sore muscles. The second day, while checking on other patients, he rises from a bedside to see Jesse leaning on a pillar, searching the room anxiously. He goes to the boy, twisting his staff in his hands. “Jesse?”

The boy turns to regard him without recognition. “Sir, have you seen my sister?” His trembling, it seems, is not just from the effort of standing. “She’s missing. I can’t find her.”

“I believe she’s all right,” he says briskly. “You ought to be in bed.”

“I can’t find Anne,” the boy protests. “What will Ma say? I have to find her.” He takes a step away from the pillar and immediately his knees buckle. Ibn Sina manages to catch him and ease him to the ground. “I need to find Anne,” the boy pleads, struggling to sit up. “I have to protect her. She needs me. She doesn’t know her prayers yet.”

“It’s all right,” he replies, one of the hakims coming to help him raise the boy to his feet. “Everything is all right. You need to rest.”

The boy leans on them heavily, bare feet stumbling. “What will Ma think?” he whispers, tears slipping down his cheeks. Once they get him back to his bed (how he got more than a few feet is a testament to his determination) he quickly falls into an uneasy sleep.

Ibn Sina brushes the boy’s tangled dark hair off his sweat-sticky forehead. “I believe she would be proud of you,” he says quietly to the boy.

The third day of the fever is the worst. It is at its highest and the boy is tormented by visions, restless and agitated, crying out sometimes in what is either English or fevered babble. Ibn Sina has only heard a few words of English since Jesse arrived, mostly startled exclamations and frustrated muttering when trying to remember the correct word in Arabic. When the boy learned Arabic is one of the questions he never considered until now, though he supposes it happened on the journey here. He can imagine the boy on the boat, trying the patience of the sailors with “What is the word for this? And this? And this?”

By midday the sun’s heat can be felt even inside the hospital; the air is stifling. Mirdin, who throughout his friend’s sickness has alternated between short, awkward visits and borderline smothering, manages to coax and then rest in the wading pool with Jesse in his arms, murmuring soothing words and humming prayers, trickling water through the other boy’s curls. Jesse whimpers and squirms at first, for the water must be uncomfortably cold to him, but something about Mirdin calms him and he settles, enduring it for a long time, resting his head on Mirdin’s shoulder like a tired child. Every once in a while Mirdin offers him a sip of water or a fragment of matzah, feeding him by hand. “Oh, Adonai Rapha, break the back of this fever,” Ibn Sina hears Mirdin pray. “Give me back my friend.”

“Amen,” Jesse murmurs, absorbed in watching his hand make ripples in the pool.

When they bring him back out of the pool and gently dry him off, he sways on his feet and grumbles but submits to their ministrations. He says, or perhaps asks, something in English. Mirdin explains calmly that once he’s dried off he can lie down and rest. Jesse repeats himself impatiently, pulling away. Mirdin hesitates. Jesse turns to Ibn Sina and says plaintively, “Da.”

He doesn’t need to speak English to know what that means. It’s in the tone, the eyes, the body language: Baba, please, I don’t want to. He feels frozen in time, and then the moment passes. “Jesse, you must rest.”

A stream of complaint, a vague gesture toward the Madrassa, and then he takes Ibn Sina’s wrist. More plaintive words, ending in “Da” and what he supposes is ‘please.’

“Perhaps he doesn’t want to lay down yet?” Mirdin ventures, avoiding Ibn Sina’s eyes.

“He’s too weak for a walk,” he replies firmly.

“Da,” Jesse pleads, tugging.

He takes him on a single rotation of the sick room. Jesse hums an unfamiliar tune all the way, leaning his head on Ibn Sina’s shoulder, holding his wrist in both hands. When they return to his bed, he says something that ends in a grateful “Da.” And then the boy hugs him tightly.

Ibn Sina is still thinking about it when the fever finally breaks six hours later.


	3. Holy Ghost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Latin translations in hover-text and also at the bottom.

“I would have been a father,” Rob Cole says hollowly. His excited description and explanation of the interior of the human body, which flared in beauty for a while, has been extinguished.

There is only one possible name: only one woman has ever distracted the boy from his duties more than once. “Rebecca.”

The boy nods, then shudders. “They’re going to stone her for adultery,” he says, voice cracking. “We may all die, but at least decapitation is quick.”

“It is,” he assures him. Such cold comfort belongs to a cell for dead men. Outside the window, the moon has moved enough that her light is gone; he reckons they have some hours yet before dawn, and he does not expect they will be executed until mid-morning. “But it will not be as drawn out for her as you fear.”

The boy sniffles, weeping again. “How do they do it?”

“I have only ever refused to answer your questions when I thought the answer would harm you,” Ibn Sina says. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” the boy whispers.

“Then accept this answer: it does not matter, and it will do no good to dwell on it. There will be pain, but they will not draw it out. Despite what some may claim, Jews have no interest in torture.”

The boy moans, slumping to the floor to rest his head on his arms, the chains clinking. “Where do Jews go when they die?”

“The devout to Abraham’s bosom.”

“And the ones who are stoned to death?” he challenges.

“Their sins are between them and their God, who is slow to anger and rich in mercy. If she repents, that may be enough.” He pauses, then asks, “What of your God?”

“Oh, I have prayed,” Rob says miserably. He swallows hard. “I prayed every night for forgiveness for my lies. I prayed for forgiveness every time I picked up the scalpel or the pen.” He hesitates, worrying at his lower lip. “But I don’t know if He hears me anymore. I have strayed so often. I misused my talents. I lied over and over again, three years of lies.”

“What of the good you did? Does that matter so little?”

“I lied while performing them!” the boy cries. “Everything I’ve done here was done in sin.”

“So they don’t count?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he moans. “I don’t know. _Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori._ I wish I could explain myself to a priest.” He moans again. “I’m going to die with my sins unconfessed.” There’s a moment of quiet, and then the boy says, with terrified conviction, “I’m going to burn in Hell.”

“Confess your sins to me.”

The boy raises his head just enough to look at him in confusion. “You’re not a priest. What difference will it make?”

“Confess them to me anyway. Surely your God knows there’s no priest. Confess and ask for forgiveness. Clear your conscience, Rob,” he urges, leaning forward. “It can’t do any harm.”

The boy hesitates, then rolls onto his knees and bows his head, closing his eyes. He touches his forehead, his heart, left shoulder, right shoulder, then clasps his hands. “ _Ignosce mihi, Pater, quia peccavi._ ” He trembles, then sighs out a deep breath. “Oh, God, my Heavenly Father, and Jesus Christ who saved me…” Tension bleeds out of his posture. “I confess that I have lied, deliberately and knowingly, for three years. I have lost count of my lies. I confess that I have denied my Savior for three years. I have lost count of that, too. I have lusted after a woman and been with her, though we were not married. I have not kept the High Holy Days. I have…” He swallows hard. “I have defiled a corpse. I have been proud. I have been so proud, Father, and in my pride I have dragged down another man with me, the greatest and wisest man I have ever known.”

Ibn Sina can sit apart no longer. He shuffles forward and pulls the boy against his chest in an awkward, bound embrace, and feels the weight of the shackle around the boy’s neck, the wet heat of the boy’s tears soaking through his clothes.

“I have been envious of my peers,” Rob continues, voice shaking and muffled. “I have taken the name of my Lord in vain twice. I have disobeyed my Master. I have misused my talents. I have been drunk seven times, and been with a prostitute once. I have been slothful. I have been unkind, unjust, unforgiving, and unloving towards my fellow men.” He’s silent for a long moment. “For these and any sins of commission I have forgotten, please forgive me. For my sins of omission, please forgive me.” Without pulling out of the embrace, he repeats the motions he started with: “In the name of the Father,” head, “the Son,” heart, “and the Holy Ghost,” shoulder to shoulder. “Amen.” After another moment of silence, he shifts so he is leaning against Ibn Sina sideways, head resting on his chest. “Thank you, Master,” he breathes.

“Do you feel better?”

A faint, weary nod. “Yes, Master. Much better.” In a matter of minutes, the boy has actually dropped off to sleep.

Ibn Sina wonders, through the long hours that follow, how this could have been any God’s plan. The spheres of the heavens and the creation on earth are too orderly for a careless or even indifferent hand, yet this boy is about to be killed for trying to understand that order. He tries not to dwell on it, lest his agitation wake Rob.

The predawn call to prayer is louder here, and the boy stirs. At the first clink of a chain, he stiffens. “Oh,” he says, as reality settles onto his thin shoulders, bowing him under it.

Ibn Sina sighs. They sit in silence as praise is sung to Allah, including from the guards in the guardroom down the hall. “Do you have any morning prayers, Rob?” he asks after a while.

The boy is silent, then presses one ear against his master’s chest and plugs the other. “ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis,_ ” he sings softly, uncertainly. “ _Sanctificetur nomen tuum._ _Adveniat regnum tuum, fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra._ ” He steadies, becomes more confident, though no louder. “ _Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie,_ _et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris._ _Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo._ Amen.” He sighs deeply once finished.

“That was beautiful. Thank you.”

“Do you have any prayers, Master?”

He hesitates. “I believe in a God, Rob; I’m not sure which.”

He is therefore not sure to whom he owes thanks when they are rescued from the courtyard by the Shah’s guards. They are pulled down the hallways, pushed towards horses, and it isn’t until one of the guards threatens to haul Rob off on the front of his saddle like a captured enemy that the boy seems to believe it’s really happening.

The next hours are a blur: first the Shah’s imperious demands, poring over Rob’s diagrams and then talking them over with him, checking and double-checking that they have all the necessary supplies. Rob’s torn, dirty robes are replaced with clean ones, and he directs the movements of servants and guards with shaken authority. He hesitates most when Mirdin arrives, his guilt and shame lowering his voice to a whisper.

And yet, “Tonight,” Shah Ala ad Daula rasps, “ _you_ are the Shah, and I am your subject,” and Rob hardly blinks before applying the soporific.

The surgery is even more of a blur: smoke from the cleansing coals, and blood, so much blood, and Rob’s shaking voice, ordering hand me the scalpel, hold open here, hand me this tool or that. The ropes of the Shah’s guts twitch. Rob knows what he’s looking for but has difficulty finding it until finally he plunges his whole hand into the slit in the Shah’s belly. The moment when Rob’s bloody hand emerges holding a length of gut with a diseased organ the size of his thumb attached to it is the clearest.

There are sutures, and a cleansing of the wound, and bandages, and Rob’s profound silence. There is a sense of victory, perhaps too late. There is a promise of a way out, horses, guards, salvation. “What will you remember me as, Englishman?” the Sun of the State growls. “Friend or tyrant?”

“Both,” Rob says softly, and without changing their bloody clothes he leaves with Mirdin to save the Jews while Ibn Sina goes to the Madrassa.

It is once he reaches the Madrassa that his heart ruptures into pieces that will never come together again, merely bring death like the diseased organ in the Shah. The pain is nearly unbearable. Dead and dying men lie on the ground in pools of blood. The building echoes with screams. The students and hakims still alive are in shock, some wandering aimlessly, others unable to concentrate for trying to save everything. His legacy, work, and life are shattered, betrayed, bleeding out and burning to ash. He finds the library and assembles the books he can save into easy to carry stacks. He gives the stacks to those able to take orders and directs them to the east gate, then watches them flee like men abandoning a sinking ship.

He finds his most important book, the one he can only bear to put in one set of hands, and climbs onto the teaching platform for the last time, the vial of poison warming in his hand before going down harsh, burning his throat as the smoke burns his lungs. The flames dance, eating books and bookshelves alike. Their roar, as well as his blood in his ears, means he doesn’t hear Rob approach until the boy is right in front of him.

There isn’t time to explain. He begins to think he couldn’t explain even half if he lived for a hundred more years. He does what he can, answering the boy’s questions as the poison spreads, wishing he had words to ease the boy’s breaking heart. Spends a moment wishing he could watch the boy flourish. He gives his greatest student what he has left, pressing his hand into the cover of the book, throat choked with pride as he names the boy in front of him and watches him nod, rise to his feet, and become a man.

Hakim Robert Cole takes the book, the sum of his knowledge, his labor of love, and obeys his Master for the last time.

Ibn Sina closes his eyes and listens to the crackling paper, the groaning wood, and waits to hear the high, pure notes of the spheres. He waits in peace.

_A mind that flows like water, not only finding but expanding the cracks of faulty thinking, a fresh spring constantly on the move, constantly overflowing its banks._

_A quiet voice that thrills with curiosity, repeating poetry as easily as facts, soft and cajoling until it snaps out like a whip in indignation at someone else’s falsehood._

_A spirit that flashes like fire, throwing off heat and light and in need of minding lest the wrong things catch and burn._

_Beaten by nature as well as man, yet not broken. He is like the bamboo of the Far East, stiff enough to stand tall yet flexible enough to weather storms without injury._

_A soul light and easy as air, refreshing and sweet, yet mysterious and untrammeled, coming and going as it pleases, sometimes bringing soft rain and sometimes typhoons._

_A steady pair of hands, gentle and delicate, strong and skilled, only ever raised in defense. A healer’s hands. A hakim’s hands._

_A body as steady as earth, no shifting sand or unstable ground, instead fertile soil that takes good seed and yields a hundredfold, that endures and endures and endures._

Ibn Sina has never had children.

Except for one beloved son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori. - God have mercy on me a sinner.
> 
> Ignosce mihi, Pater, quia peccavi. - Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
> 
> Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum, fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie; et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. - Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. // As a spoken prayer, "For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever" is added before the Amen; this is the sung version, which I encourage you to listen to (it's beautiful), and it ends at "Deliver us from evil."


End file.
